Steven Seitz

Timeline

1. 1991–1997

   Degrees at Berkeley and Wisconsin

   A B.A. in computer science and mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1991 is followed by a Ph.D. in computer sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1997.

2. 1998–2000

   Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon

   After a year visiting the Vision Technology Group at Microsoft Research, he joins the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in August 1998 as an assistant professor of robotics and computer science. The University of Washington appoints him to the faculty in 2000.

3. 1999–2001

   Two David Marr Prizes

   In 1999 a Marr Prize paper at ICCV is A Theory of Shape by Space Carving, by Kiriakos Kutulakos and Steven Seitz. The 2001 Marr Prize papers at ICCV include The Space of All Stereo Images, by Steven Seitz.

4. 2006

   Photo Tourism and Photosynth

   Graduate student Noah Snavely, associate professor Steven Seitz, and Microsoft researcher Richard Szeliski present Photo Tourism at SIGGRAPH in 2006, and the project becomes the basis of Microsoft's Photosynth.

5. 2010

   IEEE Fellow and Google

   The IEEE names him a Fellow in 2010 for contributions to three-dimensional computer vision. In 2010 he is on leave at Google Seattle, working on a computer vision project.

6. 2015–2017

   DynamicFusion and an ACM fellowship

   DynamicFusion, with Richard Newcombe and Dieter Fox, wins the best paper award at CVPR in 2015 for real-time reconstruction of dynamic scenes. A SIGGRAPH paper in 2017 that he coauthors generates lip-synced video of Barack Obama from audio. The ACM names him a Fellow in 2017 for contributions to computer vision and computer graphics.

7. 2018–2019

   Reality Lab and a Helmholtz Prize

   The UW Reality Lab launches in January 2018 with $6 million from Facebook, Google, and Huawei, with Brian Curless, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman, and him as co-leads and with him as chair. In 2019 Building Rome in a Day, with Sameer Agarwal, Noah Snavely, Ian Simon, and Richard Szeliski, receives the Helmholtz Prize. The paper, presented at ICCV in 2009, reconstructs Rome from 150,000 internet images in less than a day, and in 2019 he serves as director of teleportation at Google.

8. As of October 2026

   Professor and Google VP

   He is a professor at the University of Washington who works on computer vision and computer graphics, co-directs the UW Reality Lab, and is a VP and Fellow at Google, where his teams include Google Beam and Flow. In 2025 he coauthors UltraZoom, a SIGGRAPH Asia paper on generating gigapixel images from regular photos.